Unfailing Love
Psalm 89; Luke 1:26-38[1]
I think there’s a lot of confusion out there about love
these days. We say, “I love you,” but what we really mean is “I’m lonely and I
want you to comfort me.” Or “I think you’re incredibly attractive and
desirable.” Or “Will you please just do what I want?” Or “I’m really excited to
have such a great looking guy/girl with me; my friends are going to think I’m important.”
Love is about wanting, desiring, or having. I think part of the reason for this
is that we associate “love” so completely with romance. As a result, love has
everything to do with feelings of infatuation or attraction or desire. That
approach to love has many people spending their lives running around looking
for their own personal holy grail of “love.” But when we do that, we tend to
lose sight of any aspect of love as a choice, love as a gift you give to
another person.
I think part of this confusion comes from the various
“myths” about love that are out there. For example, there are many who live
their whole lives looking for “the one.” You know, the single solitary
individual out of the population of the world, which consists of enough people
to fill roughly a thousand cities the size of the Chicago metro area! Another “myth”
about love is “happily ever after.” It’s the fairy-tale ideal that when you
find “the one” you’ll spend your lifetime in honeymoon bliss. I do think that
people can live happily ever after, but it doesn’t look like “honeymoon bliss.”
One of the silliest love-related myths I’ve ever heard comes from the tagline
to the 1970 film “Love Story”: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
What in the world does that even mean? If you’re human, you’ll always be in a
position of needing to say you’re sorry. If anything, love means you continually
say you’re sorry, and you keep coming back and saying you’re sorry no matter
what!
The Bible teaches us about love in many ways— through its
practical teachings, through the stories of God’s love for a wayward people,
and most importantly through the life of Jesus, who gave himself completely for
the sake of us all. Our lesson from the Psalms for today begins with a
celebration of God’s love: “Your unfailing love will last forever. Your
faithfulness is as enduring as the heavens” (Ps 89:2, NLT). As we’ve
seen over the past weeks, affirmations like this in the Psalms are often set in
the context of the disappointments, the hardships, and the afflictions the
people of Israel suffered. Their faith enabled them to confess that God’s
unfailing love lasts forever specifically in those times when their
circumstances could have led them to conclude that God had “forgotten” them.
But the truth of who God is in the story of the people of Israel is that God
never forgot them. His love for them never failed, even though their love for
God failed time and time again!
The clearest demonstration of God’s love for us all in the
Bible is found in Jesus: his birth, his life, and his death for us all. As you
may know, there is some serious theology behind this statement. Theology that
took centuries to formulate, and to some extent is still being shaped to this day.
We call it the incarnation, the belief that in Jesus, God somehow came to share
the fullness of our experience with life, including its joys and sorrows. Just
the fact of Jesus’ birth as the Son of God demonstrates God’s love for us,
because God chose to enter this world as one of us. But there’s more to it than
that. Because the idea is that everything Jesus did was a reflection of who God
is. And that includes dying on the cross. If the one who died on the cross is
God incarnate, then that means God took into himself everything that prevents
us from being the people he created us to be. That kind of love as expressed in
the fundamental affirmation of our faith that God demonstrates his love for us
in the birth of Jesus may be hard for us to grasp.
Our faith in Jesus as God incarnate is an important basis
for understanding God’s love for us. But I doubt seriously that most of us come
to the place where we truly believe that God accepts as we are through learning
about theology. I think most of us learn about God’s love for us because
somebody at some point in our lives showed us that kind of love. That’s where
the Bible’s practical teachings about love come in. One of the clearest
practical statements about love comes from the Apostle Paul: “Love is patient;
love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does
not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful” (1 Cor
13:4-5). I know, we use this Scripture primarily at weddings. But Paul’s
not talking about love only in the context of marriage. He’s talking about love
as a way of life, love as a basic attitude toward other people, love as a
commitment to following Jesus’ example.[2]
That’s easy to say, but as we know, it’s incredibly
difficult to practice consistently. How do we follow Jesus’ example by
loving each other the way he loved us? How do we give our lives away for the
sake of the kingdom of God and for the sake of others without losing ourselves
entirely? I think at least part of the answer is that we can only give
ourselves away in love when our lives are grounded in God’s unfailing
love. We can only practice this kind of love for others when we know that
God loves us unconditionally and irrevocably, always has and always will. Even
with that foundation for our love, I think we have to admit that loving others
in this way doesn’t come easily for us. To be sure, we can love our families
this way, but I think we also must admit that we all have to learn to love
other people the way Jesus did.
If we pay attention to the way Jesus’ first disciples
learned to love, I think we will discover that the way we learn to love like
Jesus did is by coming together as a fellowship of people who are trying to
learn how to follow Jesus’ example.[3] Whether
it’s feeding the hungry, or clothing the poor, or comforting the sick and dying,
or just listening to someone enough to really hear him or her,
to love as Jesus did means to give of yourself without thinking about “what am
I going to get out of this?” 500 years ago, the translators commissioned by
King James translated the Greek word for love, agape, with the word
“charity.” They were following the lead of ancient scholars who translated the
Bible into Latin, and who used the word caritas. While
“charity” has implications in our day that may be misleading, the basic idea is
one of relating to other people with genuine, heartfelt care and compassion.
As with the other lessons of Advent, we may look at our
world today and wonder where that kind of love can be found. It’s there in many
ways, but the disturbing truth is that the way we humans treat one another all
too often has very little to do with love. The promise of Advent is that God
came into this world in the birth of Jesus to show us how much he loves us, and
that he always has and always will love us in that way. If it sounds impossible
that God could come into the world in the birth of Jesus, I’ll remind you what
the angel said to Mary: “nothing will be impossible with God”! The fact that
God would go to such lengths to show us that we are all loved, that we always
have been and always will be, is the definitive demonstration of God’s
unfailing love in the midst of a long and wonderful history of God showing us
that God’s love for us never fails. And it’s that love that God shows us, throughout
history, in the life of Jesus, and in the lives of our friends and family, that
teaches us how to follow Jesus’ example of love. That unconditional and
irrevocable love, that assurance that God always has and always will love us in
this way sets us free to share love with others.
[1] ©2023 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 12/24/2023 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] I like Jürgen Moltmann’s definition of love in The Spirit of Life: A
Universal Affirmation, 255: Love means combining “respect for the other
person’s freedom” to be an individual “with deep affection for him or her as a
person.”
[3] Cf. Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians, 232. He says that the
actions that define love “are learned patterns of behavior that must be
cultivated over time in the context of a community that models and supports
such behavior.”
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